- 8.6HighCVSS base score
- 2.3%Exploitation in 30 daysEPSS · top 17% of all CVEs
- NoKnown exploitednot in CISA's KEV catalog
- NonePublic exploitsnone known yet
Description
A vulnerability in the Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Decryption and Verification or S/MIME Public Key Harvesting features of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to corrupt system memory. A successful exploit could cause the filtering process to unexpectedly reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition on the device. The vulnerability is due to improper input validation of S/MIME-signed emails. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious S/MIME-signed email through a targeted device. If Decryption and Verification or Public Key Harvesting is configured, the filtering process could crash due to memory corruption and restart, resulting in a DoS condition. The software could then resume processing the same S/MIME-signed email, causing the filtering process to crash and restart again. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a permanent DoS condition. This vulnerability may require manual intervention to recover the ESA.
Timeline
ID reserved
By cisco
- 5 months later
· 5 months later
Published
- 6 years later
· 6 years later
Record updated
Changes after publication (a new score, a public exploit, EPSS crossing 1, 10 or 50 %, leaving KEV) are kept since November 2026; earlier ones are not known.
Scores
| Scored by | CVSS | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| ciscoCNA (assigner) | 3.0 | High8.6 | CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H |
| NVDNVD · Modified | 3.1 | High8.6 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H |
- EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
- 2.3% · top 17% of all CVEs (10 Nov 2026)
- CISA SSVC
- Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial
The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: High 8.6.
Affected products
Cisco · Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA)
- affected n/a
What to do
Exploitation: The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory.
References
2
- 20190109 Cisco Email Security Appliance Memory Corruption Denial of Service Vulnerability (opens in a new tab)vendor-advisoryx_refsource_CISCOx_transferred
- 106511 (opens in a new tab)vdb-entryx_refsource_BIDx_transferred
Sources
The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.
- CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
- CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
- NVD (opens in a new tab)
- FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
- EUVD EUVD-2018-7331 (opens in a new tab)
- OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Advisories (opens in a new tab)
- CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)
Badge for a README or a ticket
[](https://cveledger.app/cve/CVE-2018-15453)Record last updated .